


titles, bestowed

by winthro



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/F, M/M, Multi, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 07:59:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18494731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winthro/pseuds/winthro
Summary: All angels eventually fall.





	titles, bestowed

Your legs trembled as you walked, nose stuffed with pollen and the cloying scent of Bliss. You saw stars twinkling at the edge of your vision, like walking through a cosmos on earth, but without the dawning awe of infinity to behold. For the hills and fields in front of you stretched an acre of white flowers, swaying gently in a breeze you were sure existed – one that you couldn’t feel on your face, or caress through your hair, but stirred a new sense of hope inside the hollowness of your bones.

You should’ve felt wonderful, alight and ridiculously content, but you were tired – exhausted, even – feeling an ache tug at your limbs, trying to pull you down like the dead calling you to your grave. You had trekked on foot for most of the day, leaving the valley and its stretch of empty fields and slow rivers towards the shrouded east. Names and faces were hard to conjure in the fog of your mind, leaving a blur of dull, warm candlelight, a flickering sense of dread, and the single-minded focus of your task.

Four. There were four; you remembered with a sharp clarity as you walked in no particular direction. You had to find him, that, you knew.

You think you fell or stumbled on a rock maybe, but suddenly, all you could see was the sky and the wisps of clouds traveling like ships in the faint blue above. You were tired… yes, so tired, and the ground was unusually soft, unlike the thin, stiff mattresses you had to tolerate – when you could even find a suitable shelter in the first place.

Your eyelids fluttered closed, losing yourself to the soft ringing in your ears, like an angel’s song, or an old hymn you recalled, the echo of it against white, wooden walls sung under omnipresent eyes filling your head as if you had been drowning in their depths. You gasped, swallowing air between your tired lips, your eyes shocked open until they came to focus, and knelt above you, was a man.

“You look lost,” he said, a tired smile on his face – a rarity, you felt as of late. It crinkled at the edges of his warm, brown eyes – trusting, you had heard, once – brown eyes were meant to belong to people you could trust.

“I can help you,” he whispered, the words fell from his lips as they had done a thousand times before. His voice was pleasant in your ears, soft but with a foundation of conviction, of strength – a Faith you could believe in. 

He held his hand out for you, and yes, you took it.

 

* * *

 

He had been the youngest and newest addition to the family, all without the childish rage that possessed John's heart, or the ruthlessness of Jacob’s judgment. Instead, there was an unshakable sadness, a melancholic song of mourning echoed in the chamber underneath his fragile ribs. Sometimes, you even thought you could hear it as clear as birdsong when he laid you down in the soft grass, between wisps of reeds and flowers so delicate you could never tell if they were wilting, or blooming like the sun.

He liked to braid the smaller ones into your hair; his fingers were clumsy as if they tried to remember the steps to this long-forgotten dance. It felt like a gift, like a dream, except that the first time you woke, you tore the frail buds out from your strands in alarm. You felt a sense of guilt like you had just destroyed something so precious, but when he called you in again, he simply smiled and began to gather the smallest flowers once more.

He would talk to you, as if weaving a story whole from the pestilent fog of your surroundings, all with the softness of a church confession. He held onto your arm like you were his guide, even as your feet dragged in the grass and he moved as if he walked on air, with all the strength of ice shards spun from water. You liked watching him, you think, the way he looked reminded you of a doll, short and slender. You were sure he was skin and bone instead of a soul trapped inside a coffin of porcelain, all wrapped up in white with a shawl of delicate lace around his shoulders that fell against his bronze skin like a sigh.

Together, you strolled the endless meadow, occasionally weaved through by a river or lake, dotted with dead trees that looked like hollow logs of driftwood, standing tall like rotted tombstones. You wish you could’ve talked to him, so that he wasn’t alone to fill the empty dream he gave you to escape the nightmare of your life, but your tongue had always felt heavy against your jaw, like a dead, detached muscle, even in times when you wanted nothing more than to scream.

Later, much later, after regret and loss, pain and the boiling heat of flame, when you were left in a void with nothing but what remained in your head – these were the memories you held onto, between the scorched afterimages of people you had loved, and the Hope you had always called home.

 

* * *

 

"I know there were others before me." Faith said one day, when you woke under the cascading white petals of a dying magnolia tree, staring at the expansive, motionless lake he kept taking you to, "I... assume you have uncovered the secret by now."

You had. You found letters and notes filled with empty goodbyes of people whose escape were cut short in ways you didn’t dare imagine. The Henbane and its twisted path were his region now, bestowed to his care after a lineage of failures, and you couldn’t help but wonder if he left them all behind for you, like a treasure hunt to sought after, with only a hollow promise of a divine end to guide your steps.

You looked up to the unnamed light above, shining through the brittle branches, watching the twisted route of a snake crawling down the bark until it slid around Faith’s arm. He stroked its white scales, even scratched under its chin, and a rare laugh escaped his lips when the snake flicked its pointed tongue out to taste it.

The moment quickly faded as his face grew solemn, and Faith let the snake go, watching it slither off into the tall, emerald grass. You wanted to wipe the frown from his mouth, wash the sorrow from his eyes, but instead, you reached up to his hand and touched the gold band around his finger.

“Then you know why I can’t leave,” Faith said softly and hesitated, looking at the ring like it was the most precious thing on earth. “...He saved me.”

You understood – because someone had already saved you as well.

The next time you saw Faith, he was not alone. He led you to the same magnolia tree as before, but this time its branches were overflowing in a floating cloud of white petals – new life given to the dying.

You had felt the peace in him, renewed in his belief. You could see it incarnate; you could see _him_.

Joseph had a certain pull, held by leaders and conmen alike, a gravity that drew you in no matter how hard you tried to defy his rule of law. You hadn’t seen the man since your baptism, where you tasted the sweet, dizzying water as a rough, determined hand held you down. You had observed in a daze of how he acted with John, the pointed, manipulative chastisement reminiscent of a disappointed parent, one that you knew well, even if yours had often tried to fix you by the strike of a belt.

There was none of that here in the Bliss – no firm voice, no gentle reprimands. “Only love,” Joseph said to the small circle of Peggies at his feet, “family – all in our Eden.”

Joseph had held out his hand, and Faith left your side and took it in his own, slowly slipping behind him with a shy, genuine smile. For a moment you felt like an invader, an intruder in their fleeting world where it was only the two of them, and the way their eyes dreaded to part.

You thought they looked happy. Maybe they truly were.

Maybe you should’ve walked away.

“But there are those who would not see it come to pass,” Joseph said, leveling his gaze, and he showed you his truth – your lie.

Afterwards, you woke up by the side of a river and felt utterly empty inside.

 

* * *

 

In the Bliss, you could see anything you wanted, anything that he wanted you to see. You were never sure how it worked, or if it was just a crafted hallucination. It had felt so real sometimes, more than the beat of your heart or the burning pain of a bullet tearing your skin. It had felt so real, and when the Marshal turned the pistol to his own skull, it had felt real.

But the regret swimming in Faith’s eyes had felt the most tangible of all.

The prison was gutted when you arrived, crawling with Angels and cultists but you had only one thing on your mind. Her.

Before this you were weak, Jacob had been right – you _were_ weak, but you _became_ strong for _her_. And when you saw her bound and terrified and so, so _angry_ in the middle of a cavern of jail cells, no one else had mattered, no one else could get in your way.

Tracey had saved you, and now it was finally your turn.

She had choked out your name when she saw you - the only one you had ever known, even as blood twisted like ribbons in your auburn hair, and smeared on your face. You wanted nothing more than to hold her, to escape into an Eden of your own design where nothing could hurt either of you anymore, but Faith had left you one last treasure to find, one last friend to lose.

One more grave to dig.

You didn’t wake up in the Bliss this time – you had been pulled in so much that you think some part of it had left with you, a small pearl rolling around in the maze of your bloodstream. It simply felt like walking through a door, passing under a curtain of fog, and then the soft grass fell flat under the dirty soles of your boots and the sweet scent infected your lungs for the last time. This had been your path, your Gate to enter, twisted and white, the metal curved in flourishes and symbols of the dead, and the soon to be.

You needed to find the Sheriff, and you thought you might have had to wander the veiled land until you found him, just as lost as you once were. But you stepped through your Gate with purpose, and in the middle of a small pond, stood Faith, his back towards you – all alone, like a solitary mourner at an empty funeral.

He greeted you like an old friend, and in a sad way, you supposed that you were – if you had to define whatever had bloomed between the two of you after all this time. He looked just as tired as you, as frail as you both were strong, and you finally realized just how similar you two could be. Could have been. Maybe once were.

“It’s good to see you,” he smiled, and you felt, in the deepest reaches of your heart, that it was the truest thing he ever said to you.

He had knelt with you in the few inches of water, and it lapped at your knees while he wiped the smears of blood from your face. There was nothing much more he could do for you, your scars and wounds were carved deep inside of you now, no longer criss-crossed on your wrist, or like a pattern of tiny, distant stars on your arm.

Faith had taken your knife from the sheath on your hip – it looked out of place, sitting in the palm of his gentle hands. So, he put it in yours.

“It’s alright, I know you understand,” he had whispered. “Love makes martyrs of us all.”

Rook wrapped your hand around the grip of the knife, and you felt his last breath just as his warm blood seeped over your fingers.

You looked up towards a distant hill and saw the magnolia tree entirely bare.

 

* * *

 

There was no eulogy this time, no intimate glimpse into the heart of the Father. There was only static rolling across the small screen, casting a hazy glow to the dark room you sat in. This time, it was not something you were meant to see.

In the morning light of the last day, you stared into the eyes of a man you had taken everything from, who now had nothing left to lose, not even himself.

All Gods die in the end – and as you found out, all angels eventually fall.


End file.
